3 - The Immaculate Heart

I had just dropped the boys at school, a frigid January morning, 19 degrees F and a stiff wind. Exactly the kind of morning you want to speed back home and then stay there. Except that I spotted this plastic bag stuck in some briars along the road, backlit by the early morning winter sun still low in the sky. It struck me how much it looked like El Corazon, the heart card in the Mexican game of Loteria -- played like bingo, only using pictures, and the iconography is simple and traditional and incredibly, compellingly beautiful. Or maybe the Immaculate Heart of Mary. I saw this and thought this even as I drove on past.

But. Then I turned around. And got out of the car, and took pictures til my fingers froze, got back in the car, looked at the pictures, saw how they could be better -- I realized I probably needed to lie on the ground to get the angle I wanted -- cursed, hopped back out of the car and walked back down to the spot where the bag was flapping in the wind. A few minutes later a Baltimore County Police squad car slowed to a stop, to inquire if the woman rolling around the frozen mud and shredded silage at the edge of a corn field maybe needed any assistance. Thanks, officer, but I'm fine, I told him. He looked skeptical but drove on.

And here is the image. It exists. I almost tremble now to recall the moment that I decided to stop, and really look. To make a photograph. Because, recently, I have simply kept on driving.  Even as I feel remote photography has once again become from this life I live every day, the only one I get. Later, I'll do it later, I'm always thinking. But later never comes, and I've also been around long enough now to be all too keenly aware that it's also always later than we think. (Time -- or, at least, my experience and expectations of time -- ceased being infinite awhile ago. I think when I turned 42 and realized that this 40s thing, it wasn't going away, and even if I'm not yet on the downside slope of this mortal coil you can see it from here).

 It was such a tremulous, fragile instant -- so bitter cold outside, I had forgotten my coffee and desperately wanted more, the pressure of the ten million things that I needed to be getting done. I could have glanced, noticed, kept driving -- I've been doing a lot of that recently. But I stopped. And when I drove home after, half-frozen and giddy from the unexpected side trip my morning had taken, I realized how good it feels to have this expectation in the day. That I will set aside a few brief moments to stop. To look, really look. To do nothing else but. My hectic life isn't going anywhere, but doing this pushes back the walls the tiniest bit. Makes some breathing room. 

I am not religious, but the way this image resonated in my head afterward kept calling to mind the prayer for the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
 
Hail, Heart most holy,
Hail, Heart most meek,
Hail, Heart most humble,
Hail, Heart most pure,
Hail, Heart most devout,
Hail, Heart most wise,
Hail, Heart most patient,
Hail, Heart most obedient,
Hail, Heart most vigilant,
Hail, Heart most faithful,
Hail, Heart most blessed,
Hail, Heart most merciful,
Hail, most loving Heart of Mary,
mother of us all.